Nothing is as delicate and brittle as thing-oriented group of people – so easily shattered by envy, covetousness, and strife once the pressure is put on.
ye do walk in the pride of your hearts; […] [do] lift yourselves up in the pride of your hearts, unto the wearing of very fine apparel, unto envying, and strifes, and malice, and persecutions, and all manner of iniquities;
and your churches, yea, even every one, have become polluted because of the pride of your hearts.
For behold, ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches,
more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted.
Zion is not a pie-in-the-sky utopia that falls in our laps once we’ve occupied our time long enough — waiting around for Jesus to return to sort everything out.
It is a permeating culture or way of life. Jesus showed the world what this utopian kingdom looks like by the miraculous works of the Father that He manifested – showing us how to end the reign of the four horsemen [statism, war, famine, and death] and establish the Reign of God.
Those works that He did are what bring about an apocalypse –
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass
but we [as free agents] must do those works for the image to become reality – revealing Jesus Christ in ourselves, being the Jesus Christ in our own situations — making the Word become flesh in us.
If not, it remains the idea of Zion — what we wait around for and sit around and talk about.
We can spend our Life searching for salvation, enlightenment, etc. “out-there” — when all the time, we carry it around in us:
behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
We must surrender [or die to] all our earthly attachments, our vain imaginations, our worldly ideas, and our petty emotions — they must all be nailed to the cross of Christ so we can change our minds [repent] and move on —
– on to that immortal aspect we have in each one of us, You as God [or God as You] — and that’s who Jesus Christ was — God as a human, or humans as God.
That’s what Jesus was showing us:
Here, in that gold-lit realm of Zion lies our true reality, where we are who we are in our right-brain-hearts – once all pretense and personas have been dropped. Where we are the fully naked-Self that just is.
Unless that change has occurred:
- where we have the same mind in us which was in Christ Jesus,
- where we’ve stopped relating to God as the “out-there”, elderly man on the throne,
- where we no longer just tag”the name of Jesus Christ” onto the words and actions of our left-brain concept of Self,
- but have begun to identify ourselves with [or as] Christ in mind and in heart
we cannot expect a physical change in our environment to manifest.
Once we’ve denied [or disowned] our Self with the fear, trembling, sorrow, weeping, and broken heart brought about by the gospel of Jesus Christ preached in its purity [by the power of the Holy Ghost and in the spirit of prophecy and revelation], taken up our cross, and started doing the same works as Jesus — then may we begin to see eye-to-eye with those in Zion.
How beautiful upon the mountains have been the feet of the one
proclaiming good tidings,
sounding peace;
proclaiming good tidings,
sounding salvation;
saying to Zion, “Thy God has reigned!”
The voice of thy watchmen!
they have lifted up their voice, crying aloud together:
because, eye-to-eye, they see YHVH turning back to Zion.
Break forth into joy, sing together,
O waste places of Jerusalem:
for YHVH hath comforted his people,
he hath redeemed Jerusalem.
YHVH hath made his holy arm bare
in the eyes of all the nations;
and all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
Living out their story in our own life, seeing the things that they saw with our own eyes, making the word become flesh — comes as we stop working in our own names, and begin to connect as family [united order] through the bonds of covenant, which knit together strangers into joint-stewards:
And now, a commandment I give unto you concerning Zion, that you shall no longer be bound as a united order to your brethren of Zion, only on this wise— […]
they shall be organized in their own names; and they shall do their business in their own name. And you shall do your business in your own name.
And this I have commanded to be done for your salvation, and also for their salvation, in consequence of that which is to come.
The covenants being broken through transgression, by covetousness and feigned words — Therefore, you are dissolved as a united order with your brethren, that you are not bound only up to this hour unto them,
And again, a commandment I give unto you concerning your stewardship which I have appointed unto you. Behold, all these properties are mine, or else your faith is vain, and ye are found hypocrites, and the covenants which ye have made unto me are broken;
And if the properties are mine, then ye are stewards; otherwise ye are no stewards. But, verily I say unto you, I have appointed unto you to be stewards over mine house.
And for this purpose I have commanded you to organize yourselves, […] For the purpose of building up my church and kingdom on the earth, and to prepare my people for the time when I shall dwell with them, which is nigh at hand.
In contrast to the current political/economic narrative of a selfish, depraved, calculating human –
Kinship governs who we are in ways current theories fail to account for:
In a world characterized by familial relationships, there is no such thing as “self-interest” [in a self-seeking, calculating sense].
For a time, humans gathered only according to their tribe and their land. Familial ties are the natural form of human community. “Advancement” has really just meant that we could begin “bonding” through other things like commerce or information – making communities out of largely unrelated persons.
The cost of this great advancement has been that few of us find joy in the work we do on this earth – few of us have time to cook healthy food and raise healthy families – and by the time most of us stop working the jobs we don’t really like, our health and family are so damaged that we’ll spend the remaining years alone, medicated in a nursing home.
When we are a thing-oriented society [instead of people-oriented] – we are all about the acquiring and the advancing. Big concrete streets to accommodate big cars, to drive to big stores to buy big plastic-stuff – building the biggest house that’ll fit on the allotted property, having tiny backyards that are paved with concrete anyway, and then sitting inside in chairs to passively observe reality on pixelated screens – and that’s supposed to create joy?
That is so far detached from the Earth:
From the dirt that God gave us – that chaos from which we can create and nurture Life. Truly living, as a people-oriented society is not about the acquiring – it’s about the connecting. It’s not about the advancing – it’s about the enduring. The struggle of human experience is to break through the barriers – and into connection, intimacy, and companionship.
This involves coming to know that – there is no value in things. They are literally no-thing at all.
The only thing of enduring, true reality is the connections between human beings. Connectivity is the key.
Humans are naturally social beings. And the family is the charitable gift society that we are all born into – for the purpose of learning the only lesson we can learn that will save us – charity. Those who learn charity will enter the charitable gift society that exists in heaven – the family of God.
For a gathered body of family is the only society that can be free and eternal – an everlasting Zion, worlds without end.
Nature [though it follows similar patterns] is ever-new and always creating:
Never boring. Each new generation that comes along learns about the mystery of the Earth as it is – the world of nature, which was patterned after that eternal world where God resides.
One would think that stability and endurance in a society would breed utter boredom and monotony. However, where we see utterly boring sameness is in our current skylines, TV shows, brand-names, and highways. Where we see monotony is in our city-states, monetary systems, concepts of property, monogamy, monoculture, etc. We are boxed-in with the whole world property-lined, zoned, speed-limited, paved, taxed, regulated, registered, addressed, and licensed.
But nobody left room for Life.
Life here on Earth is just a limited time in what is really a brief probationary situation. It’s the same play acted out on the same stage for millennia. The ancients faced the same trials and triumphs, had the same drives and desires that we do.
The props, the technology and fashions, etc. might get constantly replaced, but the plot always remains the same – to commune with God and with one another.
How many more different props and costume changes can a single play have? How many more shiny things can I own?
It is we who take something like nature – which is amoral, impartial, and anarchic — come in and bring judgments and value-claims such as kindness and cruelty, meaning and order to the whole thing. But nature itself, outside of a human left-brain-mind, is a blank canvas for our projection.
And humans have been working for millennia to make nature a safe, organized place:
But any attempt to control a single variable in a natural system will only result in more variables becoming chaotic. This is because a natural system is at rest. It is at equilibrium and can stay at equilibrium without any energy input indefinitely.
When force is applied to one part of the system, the other parts react proportionately in an attempt to restore that equilibrium point.
This is man’s fall [which is pride] — setting themselves up as Gods in their own right — trying to control the world with control, dominion, and compulsion – instead of just being spontaneously, naturally — as we suppose children or animals to be – and allowing our kingdom to flow unto us without compulsory means.
When Isaiah the prophet was told to prophesy to Israel, the Lord said:
Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.
God gave humans barefeet because He covered the Earth in dirt and grass. But man thought he could do better than God and he covered the world in concrete. So man had to invent shoes to walk on the concrete.
One thing we do begets the need to do another thing in response [so on and so forth], until we reach the point we are at currently, where we spend most of our energy fighting to control what our attempts at control have caused.
The structure.
We’ve separated ourselves within our little families with the minimum amount of adults required, each having our own properties and our own possessions – to such an extent that we miss out on the richness of oneness with others – the simple salve of being freely connected to all our human brothers and sisters.
That safety in numbers that comes as we gather. Our souls cry-out for this connection and free association – but like when the body is missing a necessary component or nutrient, we may be able to cope but can never truly be made whole without it.
This satisfying level of community comes as human-beings connect with other human-beings. A husband, wife, and resulting children look exactly like how the scriptures define a paradisaical, Zion community — the kind of community believers in Christ are supposed to be building, making it “on earth“, as it is “in heaven“.
Such a body of believers in Christ [who are bound by both kinship and shared belief] should continue to grow itself along the same lines — as a family.
Families meet together naturally, they do not “have meetings”. Going door-to-door, handing out religious tracts – that’s advertising. That’s marketing religion and religious paraphernalia.
Church and missionary work are about being engaged in gathering the tribes of Israel – gathering people out from among the tribes of the earth. Everyone who comes unto Christ, whether they are of the direct bloodline of Israel [Jacob] or not [a Gentile], is automatically numbered among the house of Israel when they are converted to the Lord. The covenants that the church priesthood administers are what takes unrelated believers in Christ and binds them [knits them] together into bona-fide tribes of Israel – the Lord’s family.
The reason we are all “one in Christ” is that we all become His sons and daughters. That rebirth is fundamentally conceived of and described along tribal lines:
- it is patterned after the image of being embraced by a bendoin sheik and being brought into his tent.
- it is the chain of eternal family sealings going back to Adam and Eve.
- it is the fathers’ hearts turning to children and the children’s hearts to the fathers.
It’s all tribal in nature.
When we take unrelated believers in Christ and knit them together by covenant into a family – we restore the tribal notion of Israel, a separate people-group, or nation of kings & priests and queens & priestesses.
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